MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Daniel Licht died at his home in Topanga, California, on August 2, 2017, at the age of 60, following a battle with a rare form of sarcoma.

Best known for his darkly playful music for all eight seasons of Dexter, Licht enjoyed a career spanning film, television and video games, with other notable credits including Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Thinner, Silent Hill: Downpour and the Dishonored series.

Daniel James Licht was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 13, 1957. He began studying clarinet at eight and guitar four years later, playing jazz professionally while still in high school. At Hampshire College in Massachusetts he studied composition, jazz and world music, interests which subsequently took him far beyond conventional Western orchestral traditions.

After graduating, Licht moved to New York and became involved in the Lower East Side experimental music scene. He performed with jazz musicians including Don Cherry, Jaki Byard and David Amram, while travelling through Europe composing for theatre and dance companies. His fascination with non-Western music took him to Japan and Indonesia, where he studied gamelan music in Java and Bali. These experiences profoundly influenced his later scores, which frequently incorporated exotic instruments and unusual percussion.

Licht moved to Los Angeles at the encouragement of his friend and former classmate Christopher Young, initially assisting Young with synthesizer programming and performances before establishing his own composing career. After several low-budget projects, Children of the Night (1991) proved an important breakthrough. He quickly became particularly associated with horror, scoring Amityville: It’s About Time (1992), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992), Ticks (1993), Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Stephen King’s Thinner (1996) and the werewolf thriller Bad Moon (1996).

These scores revealed Licht’s enthusiasm for unconventional instrumental colors. Children of the Corn II incorporated instruments including Indian flutes and Chinese pipa, while Hellraiser: Bloodline combined orchestra and choir with Tibetan horns and chanting voices. Although many of the films themselves were modest genre productions, Licht consistently approached them with imagination and seriousness. He later broadened his filmography with projects including Permanent Midnight, Soul Survivors, Cowboy Up and Beneath the Dark.

His career changed dramatically in 2006 when he was hired to score Showtime’s Dexter. Although Rolfe Kent wrote the series’ celebrated opening-title music, Licht created the underscore that defined Dexter Morgan’s strange world for eight seasons. He mixed Latin and Caribbean influences with unsettling chamber writing and wonderfully macabre percussion, creating sounds from knives, scissors, saws, wine glasses, duct tape and even human bones. The result could be sinister, melancholy or darkly comic, perfectly reflecting the contradiction at the heart of the show’s serial-killer protagonist. Licht received five BMI awards for his work on the series.

Television subsequently became a major part of his career, with credits including Kitchen Confidential, Jake in Progress, Body of Proof, Deception, The Red Road and Guilt. He also found a substantial new audience through video games. After succeeding Akira Yamaoka on Silent Hill: Downpour (2012), Licht also scored Silent Hill: Book of Memories, before creating the atmospheric music for Arkane Studios’ acclaimed Dishonored (2012) and Dishonored 2 (2016). His final work for the series appeared posthumously in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017), which was dedicated to his memory.

Licht is survived by his wife Hilary, their son Kian, his mother and siblings.